Rate Limiting

Category: infrastructure

A technique used to control the amount of incoming traffic or requests to an API or service.

Rate limiting is the "bouncer." It prevents any one user or bot from slamming your API with 10,000 requests per second. It protects your infrastructure from brute-force attacks and ensures that the system stays fair and available for everyone.

Common Examples

• We implemented rate limiting on our public data portal to prevent unauthorized scrapers from overwhelming our core database nodes.
• Our API gateway enforces tiered rate limiting, where enterprise partners receive a higher request allowance than anonymous public visitors.